Craig Thomler's professional blog - eGovernment and Gov 2.0 thoughts and speculations from an Australian perspective

Craig Thomler

I've worked in the online sector since 1995 in roles including founder, publisher, journalist, webmaster, marketer, channel manager, CIO, COO and visionary. I left the public sector in early 2012 to lead Delib Australia as Managing Director Australia and New Zealand. More...

Friday, September 17, 2010

The US government recently launched Challenge.gov, a site allowing US agencies to manage and promote challenges, prizes and competitions where the community is asked to help solve a wide range of public governance issues - all in one central location.

The challenge concept is a simple one. By tapping into the wisdom of crowds governments and other organisations are able to provide better and more cost-effective solutions to problems, large or small.

It's hard to see the downside of this approach. Government pays a small amount to incentivise participation in the challenge (a prize). If none of the challenge entries provide a better solution, or are not approaches that a government cannot adopt, the time and money cost is negligible. If a better solution - or multiple better solutions - are entered, then government has made a significant gain at little cost.

The US has taken this a step further by embedding the challenge 'DNA' into a low cost technique available to public servants with the support of the political arm of US government.

Already there are over 40 challenges on the site, with many, many more to come.

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